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Positive Links Speaker Series

David L. Cooperrider, PhD

Positive Links
Gain inspiring and practical research-based strategies for building organizations that are high performing and bring out the best in people. Learn from leading positive organizational scholars and connect with our community of academics, students, staff, and leaders. Positive Links sessions take place at Michigan Ross, and are free and open to the public.

About the talk
Drawing from his forthcoming book, David Cooperrider, explores the proposition that the quest for a flourishing earth is the most significant organization development (OD) opportunity of the 21st century—and that when people in organizations work toward building a more flourishing world they too are poised to thrive in ways that ignite innovation, leadership development, and inspired workplace performance. David calls this dynamic “mirror flourishing” and shows how the design of positive institutions—institutions that magnify and refract our highest human strengths outward into the world-- is OD’s ultimate North Star. What David is envisioning is a watershed moment in OD research and practice where our field moves from micro-OD to macro-OD, and then back again. It's an age where OD will increasingly find its most profound work on “the outside” of the enterprise and where institutions are re-defined not as clients but instead as the change agents. And then the reverse flourishing paradox unfolds. The more successful our macro OD becomes (for example helping a Tesla Motors electrify the renewable energy age) the more powerful our micro impact will become (a flourishing enterprise on the inside.) Using P/N ratios from successful large-scale change initiatives to explore the new change equation, as well as data from over 4,000 interviews into “business as an agent of world benefit” David Cooperrider points to a colorful array of real-life stories and OD cases, but all of this with just one overarching conclusion: there is nothing that brings out the best in any organization faster, more consistently, or powerfully than bringing “the whole-system-into-the-room” to design win-win-win solutions to our world’s great global challenges.

David CooperriderAbout Cooperrider
David L. Cooperrider, PhD is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the Fairmount Santrol - David L. Cooperrider Professorship in Appreciative Inquiry at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, where he is the faculty founder of the Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit.

Cooperrider is best known for his original articulation of “AI” or Appreciative Inquiry with his mentor Suresh Srivastva. Today AI’s approach to strengths-inspired, instead of problematizing change, is being practiced everywhere: the corporate world, the world of public service, of economics, of education, of faith, of philanthropy, and social science scholarship—it is affecting them all.

He has published 25 books and authored over 100 articles and book chapters. His books include Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (with Diana Whitney); Organization Dimensions of Global Change (with Jane Dutton); Organizational Courage and Executive Wisdom (with Suresh Srivastva); and The Strengths-based Leadership Handbook (with Brun and Ejsing).

Hosted by:
Jane Dutton, co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations; Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology

Sponsors:
The Center for Positive Organizations thanks University of Michigan Learning & Professional Development, Sanger Leadership Center, Stryker, Tauber Institute for Global Operations, Samuel Zell & Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, and Diane and Paul Jones (MBA ‘75), for their support of the 2016-17 Positive Links Speaker Series.